BULLET FOR MY VALENTINE · DRUM BEAT

The drum beat in Worthless

The beat the song is built on is one bar, played through bars 1, 3 and 5, and 59 more places -- 41.5% of every bar the kit plays. Learn that one and most of the song is already under your hands.

TEMPO
181 BPM
TIME
3/4
BARS
195
LENGTH
3:14
DIFFICULTY
41/100

The beat, written out

LOOP · 181 BPM
WORTHLESS · BAR 57

It is played on crash and kick, counted in sixteenth notes. On its own it scores 24 out of 100 -- straightforward -- and the thing that decides that is the independence between the hands and the feet.

The whole song is 41 out of 100, so the beat is not the hard part: what costs you is everything around it, the joins and the fills.

How to get it under your hands

The room opens this beat on its simplest reduction, at 136 BPM, and adds the notes back a rung at a time -- 3 of them. Nothing is a matter of opinion: each rung has a tempo to reach and a gate to pass before the next one.

  1. Skeleton. Only the notes that land on a beat. The point is to feel where this bar stands.
  2. Kick and snare, whole. The feet and the snare exactly as written, and nothing else. This is the part to know by heart.
  3. As written. Open hi-hat, ghost notes, accents and the crash where they belong.

Tempo goes 136, 158 and 181 BPM, and the gate at each one is 8 loops in a row with no wrong note and no wobble in the time.

PRACTISE THIS BEAT →

Questions

What drum beat does Worthless use?

A one-bar groove on crash and kick, in 3/4 at 181 BPM, counted in sixteenth notes. It is written out above, and it covers 41.5% of the bars the kit plays.

Where does the beat come in?

Bars 1, 3, 5 and 7, and 58 more places. The time is kept on the kick and crashes to start with, and it changes 9 times over the song.

Is the beat in Worthless hard?

24 out of 100 on its own -- straightforward. The song as a whole is 41 out of 100 -- a fair first song -- with the independence between the hands and the feet the part that decides it.

READ OFF THE SCORE ITSELF · 195 BARS ANALYSED